This review consists of a systematic assessment of climate change adaptation literature to elicit major trends, discourses, and patterns in how local knowledge is conceived. We report on conceptual and geographic trends within the literature, including the practice of assessing local knowledge against scientific benchmarks, and present results of a textual network analysis that illustrates overlap and co‐occurrence among different characterizations of local knowledge. In critically assessing the dominant trends we draw special attention to problems associated with the extraction of local knowledge without due consideration of how this process is embedded and inextricable from local contexts and sociotechnical orders. Drawing on theories of science and technology that examine the ontological politics of research practices, we propose a co‐productive path forward for local knowledge mobilization to inform adaptation decision‐making, which we argue facilitates the transformation of the institutional and governance arrangement of climate adaptation to provide greater flexibility and experimentalism in research and decision‐making. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e475. doi: 10.1002/wcc.475 This article is categorized under: Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Knowledge and Practice